This ancient city by the sea has embraced modernity
for nearly a century, and never more so than today, with its stunning architecture, booming cultural scene, and lively nightlife

The ancient port of Jaffa, on the southern edge of Tel Aviv

The ancient port of Jaffa, on the southern edge of Tel Aviv

In Tel Aviv, people are always talking about “the bubble.” The lush lifestyle is a bubble. The almost surreal sense of distance from political woes is a bubble. The giddy sense that high tech and high culture are both booming here is a bubble. You don’t even have to be a native to feel it. Charles Renfro, a principal in the New York architectural firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro and a frequent visitor to Tel Aviv, says, “Every day feels like the best beach day, every bite the most sublime taste, and every night like the last party on earth.”

It doesn’t feel like the bubble is bursting anytime soon. From the Arab port of Jaffa, dating from the Bronze Age, to the famed rows of white, modernist Bauhaus buildings, to the 21st-century tech start-ups racing like wildfire across town, Tel Aviv inhales its past and exhales the thrill of the present. In Jaffa on any Friday morning, the first day of the weekend, the sounds of families at café tables echo in the area once occupied by soldiers of the Crusades. The sweetness of honeysuckle seems suspended over streets that tilt toward the timeless blue of the Mediterranean. The neighborhood’s locals and joggers from all over the city (an ocean promenade stretches from Namal, the restored port in Tel Aviv’s north, to Jaffa in the south) line up at the Margoza Family Bakery for freshly baked croissants and cappuccinos, or browse the great flea market between Yefet Street and Jerusalem Boulevard, where everything from antiques to high-end fashions can be found.

The interior of Raphael restaurant

The interior of Raphael restaurant

It’s helpful to know the quirks of Jaffa — that Albert’s Nuts on Rabbi Pinhas Street, with its addictive salted almonds, is open only on Fridays or that the shop called Palestina, on Oley Zion Street, has a cache of electrical antiques from before Israel’s founding in 1948. Lately, merchants have been complaining that rising rents are forcing some of them out, but that is an unfortu- nately common complaint in Tel Aviv, whose real estate rivals the craziness of New York prices. Still, the restaurants in Jaffa—spots like Charcuterie, Yoezer Wine Bar, and chef Nir Zook’s super-luxe Cordelia—are often crammed at night, with revel- ers, drinks in hand, spilling onto the streets.

“The culinary revolution in northern California, where I cooked for a while, was incredible for me, but I couldn’t keep away from Tel Aviv,” Zook says. “The mix of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and European cultures makes the place, let alone the food, unforgettable. I can be as wild as I want in what I make, in the way I live, as simple or rich. It’s like love. There’s no limit.”